


Section Breach

by Sholio



Category: Alliance-Union - C. J. Cherryh
Genre: Action/Adventure, Gen, Hurt/Comfort
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-18
Updated: 2021-01-18
Packaged: 2021-03-14 22:02:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,046
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28802508
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sholio/pseuds/Sholio
Summary: Lt. Graff, a tank breach on station, and a bunch of local kids.
Comments: 10
Kudos: 13





	Section Breach

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Equality Auction for a wonderful donor who wished to remain anonymous.

Graff was the one who noticed—the _only_ one who noticed, the only reason, perhaps, why there weren't bodies on the Mariner docks that mainday.

There was absolutely no sign of trouble, at first. He had fallen back from the other Norways, stopping to look in the display windows of a small shop selling vids and book-tapes and games, general shipboard entertainment. He was thinking he might take something back for Di and Signy, both of them stuck on the ship for mainday watch while Graff shepherded a small flock of mainday crew around the station on the limited amount of leave they were allowed. With tension cranked tight as it currently was, he wouldn't be willing to place odds whether either of them would see any part of the station other than, perhaps, the offices.

Everything in the window was badly out of date. Pell, where they'd just come from, had all the new and trendy entertainment items. Mariner had probably gotten newer installments of serials from the data dumps unloaded from _Norway_ and the two merchanters she had guard-dogged in from Pell.

Still, he saw a game that had been popular some ten or fifteen years back; it looked like the kind of thing Di liked, and he was pretty sure there were no copies circulating on the ship. There was nothing in the window that said Mallory to him. The shop would have a wider selection inside.

He did a quick sweep of the docks, by habit and paranoia. There was a lot of station security around, whole blocks of shops shut down. The war was taking a big bite out of commerce as merchanters started skipping runs and changing routes for their own safety. But there was nothing that seemed likely to erupt into trouble in the five minutes he planned to spend in the shop. So far, the Norways had been entirely well-behaved, chastised by Mallory beforehand to do nothing to contribute to the station's current tensions. The group had splintered to look into shop windows and examine price lists at bars.

Graff raised a hand to the nearest ranking officer, Dr. Sena, deep in conversation with one of the pilots. She fell back a few steps at his summons. "I'll be out a minute," he told her. "Any trouble, comm me."

She nodded and rejoined the others. He stepped into the shop.

It was cluttered and dim. He was very nearly the only adult; the shoppers were mostly teens. Flash fashion, stationer hairstyles. There were headsets and a small booth for trying things out, and a corner with a screen and an ADULT ONLY sign that had the porn. 

God, these places didn't change. It was like a kick to the back of his brain, a sweet-sharp memory of visiting places like this on rare station leaves once he was old enough to be let out of the children's loft on the _Polly_. Even the smell was the same, the musty plastics of game and book cases, with sweet overtones from the candy dispensers up by the counter.

He examined some cases, glanced out the narrow slice of window not blocked by merchandise to make sure the Norways hadn't found trouble in the couple of minutes since he left them, and that was when he felt it: a change in the vibration underfoot.

It was a kind of vigilance that came from years of the war, of course. But it went back long before that. It went back to growing up shipboard, to the way that all merchanter brats learned to read the rhythms of the ship before they learned their letters. It wasn't a conscious choice. It might as well have been written in his DNA. 

He had been doing it without really thinking about it since he'd set foot on Mariner's echoing gray dockside, adjusting to listen to the station's heartbeat instead of the ship's. He read it all without really thinking about it, the vibration of the deck plates underfoot, the drafts from ventilation and ships' accesses venting, the smells of oil and grease, metal and ozone, perfume and food from the shops around the curve of the dock.

Now something was different. And different, to the ship-bred, meant wrong.

He went from the game rack to the doorway in a single jump, stumbling a little in station gravity. In the close confines of the shop, his shoulder rebounded off another customer's, knocking her out of the way. Her startled "Hey!" barely registered on his conscious mind.

His first thought was for the Norways, who were all updock a little ways, enough that the curve was starting to be noticeable. He commed Sena.

"I don't know if it's serious, but—" he began, and got that far before the steel deck plates buckled in front of him. It was like a holo effect, a rippling series of buckling plates that ran in an instant across the decking.

"What?" Sena said in his ear.

"Shelter!" he snapped. "Stationers too! Get everyone down!"

As the Norways began to scatter, herding stationers along with them, the floor exploded. A geyser seared it like a knife, something that had been under pressure and now was not, erupting through the floor and exploding instantly on contact with atmosphere into a whitish cloud.

Graff caught a lungful as he stumbled backward, grabbing for the door handle. Like most dockside businesses, where sudden pressure drops or violence were an ever-present hazard, the entertainment shop had a blast door—capable of stopping anything from vacuum to gunfire. Manual, this one, not automatic.

He was dimly aware of others helping: the teenage girl he'd knocked aside, and a couple more, grabbing hold of the door beside him and helping haul it down. The girl was coughing. Graff felt as if his lungs had been dipped in liquid fire, his sinuses seared. Something was wet on his upper lip and he hoped it wasn't blood. He couldn't stop coughing.

He glimpsed section seals starting to drop before the blast door cut off his view, and then he leaned against it, coughing and gasping for air. Around him, there was scattered coughing, exclamations, questions—and then a sudden hush when, abruptly, everything went pitch black. 

Either the electrical to this section of Green Dock had been severed by accident, or someone had cut the power. There were a few reasons why they might have done that, and none of them were anything good. His brain supplied the options anyway: to halt the risk of spark ignition from something flammable in the air, to cut off saboteurs, to keep the docked ships from disengaging without ripping off their airlocks ...

In the darkness, someone banged into an overloaded rack. Tapes clattered across the floor. Someone else was coughing themselves out of breath. Someone's hand clutched at Graff's arm. He tried to put them off gently—they were kids, he reminded himself—and struggled to get his coughing under control, wiping at the damp heat on his upper lip. His eyes burned.

"Sena," he said into the comm, his voice scraped out.

There was only static. Without station power to relay and boost, and with interference from station shielding, the shortwave comms they used off the ship were all but useless. He caught snatches of signal through the noise, snippets of conversations cut apart and pieced together. Nothing that resolved into actual sense.

"This is Graff," he said through the raw pain in his throat, on the off chance anyone could hear him. "I'm okay." More or less. "There's some kind of rupture or leak on the docks, I think."

He didn't mention the possibility of sabotage. Not on an open channel, not knowing who could pick up the signal. No good options in giving _that_ any more traction than it already had. Rumor and panic traveled fast in situations like this.

"I'm trapped with some locals in the center section of Green Dock, separated from the rest of our people." 

They were all right, he told himself—they _were_. Behind one of the section seals, they must be going out of their minds trying to get in touch with him, same as he was.

There was no other information he could think of to relay, assuming he could be heard at all. He didn't know what the stuff in the air was. Could be damn near anything—sealant, fuel for the pushers, solvent, any one of a hundred industrial chemicals that might be stored under there. His mouth had an unpleasant metallic taste.

Around him, in the dark, people were coughing and crying. They were his priority right now. He coughed agonizingly, got a breath, and lurched to his feet.

"I'm the XO of the _Norway,"_ he said into the flat dark. He didn't like how ragged his voice was, however hard he tried to steady it, the slight hitches as he fought down the urge to cough. "That's the Fleet ship in dock out there." He blinked his burning eyes against the blackness. "Is there water in there? Bottled water, a sink, something?"

There was, suddenly, light. It was a handheld light and it came from the back of the shop, dancing will-o-the-wisp style. Behind it was the clerk's face, round and young with a wisp of beard. "There's a machine for drinks, by the wall." His voice was even younger than the face. "There." He pointed with the light.

Machine like that was going to take chits. "Do you have a key? We need to rinse this out of our faces and eyes." He could see, at least, though it was through tears of pain. That was one thing he very carefully had not allowed himself to panic about.

"Uh, yeah, I can open it." The beam of light moved jerkily, splintered into rainbows by Graff's watering eyes. "What was that? What happened?"

"Station blew a tank." He wasn't going to speculate on causes. At the same time, he became aware of a faint hissing, and also began to suspect chemical taste wasn't just residual. The door wasn't sealed completely, and some of that stuff was getting in. "Is there a way out of here?"

"No," the clerk said. He had the machine open now, pulling out water bottles. "We're just supposed to wait if there's an emergency or a—a breach."

Lucky for them it wasn't hard vacuum out there, with the ill-fitting door. The chemical taste was getting stronger. He moved forward, feeling his way past the racks through the gloss of his watering eyes. Touched yielding fabric with warm skin beneath; its owner pulled back with a startled gasp. "Sorry," he murmured. "Is there something fabric in here? Can of sealant? Anything we can seal the door with?"

"I have a scarf," said a girl's voice. Stationer accent.

"Can we get the light over here?" Graff asked, and the clerk turned to shine it at the door. "Which one of you has the scarf? Pack it underneath, stop any more of that from getting in."

Someone shyly pushed a bottle of water into his hands. Graff tipped his head and rinsed his eyes and face quickly, swished out his mouth, then handed the bottle along to someone else. That helped a lot with the burning in his eyes. Nothing to be done about the lungs. His chest felt scraped out from the inside. He tried not to think about what it was doing in there.

In the cold glare of the clerk's handlight, he could see his fellow refugees better now. About half of them wore the mismatched and colorful clothing that meant stationer, eclectic fashions that would never stop seeming strange to eyes trained by merchanter coveralls and Fleet uniforms. The only actual adult among the lot of them was a stationer woman holding a child, much younger than any self-respecting merchanter would allow out on the docks. Father was a spacer, maybe; mom had brought him down to meet dad, come in on a run. Or just a local, slumming it, like the stationer teens.

The rest were in silver coveralls, all with the flower patch on the sleeve for _Lotus Dancer_ , one of the ships that had come in with _Norway._ Merchanter juniors, five of them, between the ages of about 15 and 17, all of them clustered together automatically when things went bad. They were dutifully taking turns rinsing each other's faces with the bottled water. One of them was the girl who had helped him pull the door down. She'd gotten it almost as bad as he had.

God, _that_ was a situation that could go bad quickly, out there, when _Lotus Dancer_ realized her children were gone. It made his stomach go cold, thinking of the possibilities. Merchanters couldn't take on a Fleet warship, of course. They wouldn't even try. But there would be Lotuses scattered up and down the docks, angry now, willing to do almost anything to get their juniors back. Like, say, taking hostages, if they thought it would help—if they had reason to believe Fleet had done something with the children, or someone else had.

No point in worrying about it. Nothing he could do. In emergencies like this, it was necessary to narrow his focus down to his own little piece of it, not thinking about anyone else's pieces. The world outside the shop—the bangs and clanks he could feel through his feet, whatever was going on out there wasn't his problem. _This_ was his problem, a dozen civilians he was responsible for.

"Listen," he said, and they all turned to him, the juniors and the station kids, the shop clerk, even the stationer mother who was probably older than he was, in actual lived years even if he'd been born long before she had, station time. "Staying here isn't our best option. The air's getting worse. We need to find a way out."

"We're supposed to shelter in place in an emergency," the clerk repeated. He was still handing out bottles of water, even though no one really needed them anymore. It gave him something to do.

"I can't get through to my ship," one of the juniors said anxiously.

"Comms aren't working." Graff fought off a cough. Even if not for the fumes seeping in from outside, if the power was down then the ventilation would be too, and this was way too many people for such a small space. "What's in the back?"

"Nothing," the clerk said. "Just the wall."

"And what's behind the wall?"

They would know. He hadn't had much to do with stationer kids all those years ago, but he had gotten to know more than a few station-born in the years since; there were a lot of them in Fleet. They grew up learning a station's secret map of access hatches and ventilation tunnels, the same way merchanter kids knew all the secret byways of the ship, the hidden smuggling holes for getting things past customs and the secret routes in and out of the children's loft that the adults pretended they didn't know about. 

The stationer kids looked at each other. Graff sensed some kind of shared understanding passing between them, that he—an adult, and a Fleet officer—wasn't privy to. It was the mother who spoke at last, adjusting her child against her shoulder. She had taken off her jacket and put it over his head to help protect him from the fumes. "There's a maintenance space back there," she said. "It runs all the way around Green Dock."

"There's no way in from the shop," the clerk said firmly.

"Yeah, so let's make one." Graff held out a hand. "I need your light."

The clerk yielded it up a bit nervously, as if it was his last tiny bit of control over the situation. Graff took it and went behind the counter. As the clerk had said, the shop backed directly on the wall. The sides were welded in place, ceiling too; it was like a shipping container secured to the wall, and in fact, with the resourcefulness for reuse of materials that spacers and stationers shared, it might have been made out of one. There was no room for a storage room or head, just raw paneling, its plain metal plates covered in colorful posters advertising ten-year-old vids. Spare inventory was stored in crates behind the counter; he had to shove them aside to move around.

Graff pulled back the posters, ran his hand over the wall. With a cutting torch or a set of marine armor, access would have been easy. 

_New policy change: from now on everyone carries a pocket acetylene cutting torch. I'm sure we can get a shipment of a few thousand from Earth ... in about twenty years ..._

"There might be a panel in the floor," a quiet voice said. He glanced around and saw the stationer girl who had given him the scarf. She looked maybe fourteen and was wearing earrings and bracelets that glimmered faintly every time they clicked together as she moved. Kinetic energy turned to light. She pointed. "Under the mats."

The kids gave him a hand shifting crates and peeling back the mats of coarse, fireproof basalt fiberglass covering the floor. There was more coughing, and he didn't like the ground-glass feeling in his chest whenever he moved. They had to get out of here.

But the girl was right. They found it in a corner, with a rack of games on top of it. There was no locking pad, and it took Graff a moment to recognize a mechanical locking mechanism with a metal tongue. He kicked it a few times, then looked around for something to pry it up with.

"Here," said the stationer girl, "you do it like this." 

She crouched down and slipped something out of her pocket that flashed in the handlight: a knife, homemade, ground from a piece of scrap steel. She slipped it under the lock with practiced hands.

"What's your name?" Graff asked. It was hard not to press her to hurry. His chest felt wet and heavy. Some of the kids in the back were coughing hard now.

"Chantou," she said. She grimaced. "Ugh, stuck—"

"Here, I'll help," the stationer woman said. She bent down, shifting the child awkwardly, in an attempt to free her hands.

"I can take him," Graff said. She hesitated briefly and then handed him off into Graff's arms.

It had been a long time since Graff had been around children. Carriers and Fleet stations were not exactly populated with kids. At most he had seen them from a distance while stationside.

But like any merchanter child, he had grown up taking care of younger children. His arms took the little boy without conscious direction from his brain. Same way he'd known there was something wrong on the station, something spun off true. You just _knew._

"And you?" he asked the child's mother. "What's your name?"

"Adia," she said quietly. "That's Kivi."

"What about the rest of you? Let's get to know each other."

The kids sounded off with their names as well, and meanwhile, between the two of them, Chantou and Adia popped the lock and opened the trapdoor. Graff handed the child back to his mother, and leaned over to shine the handlight down into that black nothing.

As Adia had said, there was an empty space inside the wall, a sort of double layer separating the dock underfoot from the outer wall of the ring. He had, without really thinking about it, imagined that it would be on ship scale. But this was station scale, vast and echoing, with the chill gloss of tanks and the glimmer of catwalks. It was bonechillingly cold.

But it was somewhere to go. There was a steel maintenance stairway leading down, with a cable for a handrail. _Not_ where he'd choose to take a bunch of kids if he had any choice. But he didn't see how they had options. If they could just get around the bad section and come out somewhere else, they'd be fine.

"Anyone know where this goes?"

No takers. Graff pointed to the clerk, the only other adult here besides Adia. "I'll lead. You bring up the rear."

The kids traipsed down the stairs behind him with scattered coughing and some quiet, giggling comments back and forth. As they got out of the deathtrap of the shop, it was starting to feel like an adventure, for some of them at least. He stopped on a landing below, where a catwalk went off both ways into the dark, above a huge pipe carrying unknown contents. He waited while they caught up, looking back up the column of stationers and _Lotus Dancer_ juniors strung out along the ladder. 

The station's shielding might be less restrictive here, enough to get through to _Norway._. Graff tried the comm again. "Captain Mallory. Janz. It's Graff. Anyone picking me up?"

Still nothing. As the kids jammed up behind him, he started walking again, lighting his way with the narrow beam. The empty, echoing space around him felt vast. God, but he hated stations. Give him the close confines of a ship any day. He knew every panel and screw in _Norway._ Here, he felt impossibly out of his depth, oppressed by the hugeness of the station around him.

It felt weirdly unfinished here, the way that _Norway_ had felt back when she was still the ECS5, all echoing spaces and skeletal walls. Or like he had somehow stepped into the back side of reality, among the girders and gantries underpinning the universe.

The merchanter kids in particular looked like they were as aware of the strangeness of their surroundings as he was—more, even. For some of them, this might be their first time on a station in their lives. They were clustered together, looking pale and terrified. The girl who had taken a lungful of fumes was having to be helped along by one of the others. Breath smoked in the freezing air; hands burned and stuck to metal things in the cold.

"Which one of you is senior?" Graff asked the merchanter kids, to distract them from what was obviously spiraling panic.

"I am, sir." The boy who spoke looked no older than the rest, a spray of darker freckles on his naturally light-tan skin.

"I'm merchanter like you." They looked skeptical, as well they might, looking at the Fleet uniform. "Or I was."

"What ship?" the boy said.

" _Polly d'Or._ A long time ago."

He stopped talking, then, as something loomed in the handlight: a silvery sheen, a reflective glaze of ice. As every spacer knew, ice meant trouble: it meant water where it shouldn't be. He saw the merchanters' reactions. The stationers were less bothered. Perhaps they were used to ice; perhaps they never had enough contact with the outermost parts of their station to care.

It was clear that a tank had ruptured here. Water, probably; there was a frozen waterfall covering the catwalk. It was strikingly beautiful, in its way.

"Any thoughts on which way to go now?" he asked, pitching it mostly to the stationers. "Need to get back to the heated areas, find some kind of exit." His hands were shaky, from cold or whatever he'd inhaled, he wasn't sure. Neither option was good, though.

"What is this, water?" one of the stationer boys asked. This devolved into a quarrel among the stationer kids about the meanings of the color-coded markings on the catwalk, which tanks were located where, and which way along the curve of the hull was more likely to lead to a maintenance access.

"Green is life support," Adia said in her quiet voice, shifting her son to her other arm. "Follow green lines; we'll get where we need to be sooner or later."

It sounded more like an article of faith than something relating to anything he'd seen so far. Still, unable to move forward, they backtracked. Graff remembered seeing a junction where another stair led down into darkness. It hadn't seemed worth it at the time, because they didn't need to get closer to the outer surface of the ring. Where they needed to do was get themselves further hubward, back toward the habitable areas with life support and heat. But, if they couldn't go forward, down might be their only option.

"This way," he called up the line when they reached the other stair, and they followed him down.

It took Graff a few moments' descent to notice that the light's beam was growing indistinct, reflecting off a haze in the air. His eyes were beginning to sting.

"Back," he snapped, "back!"

He had been afraid they were going to hit something like that, just didn't know any way to avoid it. The spin gravity inside the station's metal skin could have unpredictable effects; the gases in the air tended to separate and stratify, without the mixing effects of an entire planetary atmosphere, and adding something toxic to the gaseous mix would almost certainly result in pools and pockets. Dangerous. Potentially explosive, depending on what it was. Certainly suffocating. In this case it looked like it was heavier than the station's general oxygen-nitrogen mix, sinking to the outer edge of the ring where the gravity was strongest.

They regrouped on the catwalk. Most of the kids were coughing now, and Graff didn't like the way his heart was pounding. He was having trouble getting enough air. 

They couldn't go down. They couldn't go forward. They might wander in here for hours, trying to get back into the inner part of the ring, running out of air and strength in the cold. What else was left?

He managed to gather a shaky attitude of authority around him, strained it was.

"New plan," he announced to the assembled civilians. "We have to get a message out to my ship. I need something—a relay, a patch in the shielding, _anything."_ And also incidentally to let the _Lotus Dancer_ know that her kids were okay before the political situation on the outside exploded into a mess that could suck in both the merchanters' alliance and Fleet. "Are there physical wires for intra-station communications, something like that we could tap into?" 

Which about exhausted what he knew about the topic. Hopefully if they did find something like that, either the stationers would know what to do or it would be relatively evident what he needed to do with it.

After a hesitation, one of the stationer kids said, "My cousin works for Transit and I've been in the utility hatches back of the tubes, right? There's switching stations for electric and comms."

"No, they're separate," Chantou argued. "I mean, you know the big bundles of wires you can't touch? That's electric, and they interfere with the signals, they can't run in the same conduits. My mom said—"

"On the _Dancer,_ " one of the merchanter kids broke in, and they were off and running on a discussion of signal shielding and maintenance access that Graff didn't entirely follow. At least it seemed to be breaking down the uneasy wariness between the stationer and merchanter kids somewhat, if only temporarily.

There was an abrupt ripple in their ranks. The girl who had taken a faceful of fumes folded up and collapsed.

_Shit._

Graff pushed through the panicking kids and bent over her. She was breathing and semiconscious, but was blood on her lips, black in the chill beam of the handlight. 

"We need help now," he told them, each breath rasping through the pain in his chest. "If we can't find a relay station or something similar, I need to find a place to get through to my ship. Either way, we have to get moving. Find better air."

Adia was shushing her son, but she freed up a hand to point down, toward the blackness below the catwalk. "Out by the skin of the station will be the best chance of getting through to your ship. But down there—"

She didn't have to finish. Down there, the poisonous fumes had collected.

Graff clenched his jaw. She was right, though. It was that or clamber around in a maze until the fumes caught up to them.

"I'm climbing down," he said, decision made. "I'm going to try to get a signal out."

He peeled off his jacket—the cold went straight through the light coverall he wore beneath, and jabbed harder when he peeled that off too, ripping it at the waist. He put the jacket back on and tied the coverall around his mouth and nose. A section flopped awkwardly behind him, but that was all right. He could put it over his head to help protect his eyes.

He handed the light to Adia. 

"Don't you need this?" she protested, trying to give it back.

"All I need to do is go down. I'm not leaving you without any way to navigate. If I don't come back, try to lead them out. Don't come after me."

Adia nodded solemnly, her face scared but resolute.

As he set foot on the steps leading down, one of the juniors cried out, "Please don't leave us here!"

"You'll be better off here than with me. Trust me," he muttered under his breath.

It felt like there was a band around his ribs, and his hands were shaky. Light pooled around his feet, and he looked up, at Adia shining it down to help as much as she could.

It wasn't actually _that_ far down. He could glimpse the inner side of the great steel plates covering the station. He tried to hold his breath on pure instinct, but a cough gathered under his aching ribs and then escaped in a helpless huff of air. So much for that idea.

He pulled the shirt over his head and went by feel, careful not to miss a step. The last thing he needed on top of everything else was a broken leg.

By the time his feet hit the station's inner skin, his lungs were burning fiercely. There was a ringing in his ears. He stumbled, and caught himself on the handrail, leaving some skin behind.

"Mallory. Di. This is Graff."

His voice sounded awful. Be just his luck if he found a thin place in the shielding and couldn't speak loudly enough to be heard.

There was no answer but static. He took a few steps away from the bottom of the ladder, looking for somewhere that he could catch more than snatches of voices. The shielding was more to protect the station from solar radiation than from radio signals, although that was an incidental side effect, but even so, not all parts would be equally effective at it. There were always dead zones and spots with better reception.

"Mallory. Janz. Damn it, guys, say something."

His chest felt like it was full of fire. He stumbled, sinking down to one knee.

"Mallory. Di. Someone _talk_ to me here—"

There was an abrupt squawk of static that nearly deafened him, and then the most blessed sound in the world: Di's voice, rough and businesslike. "Graff? Where the hell are you?"

He fell forward and caught himself on his hands. Down here would be the worst air of all, he should probably stand up, but he was already holding himself together by sheer force of will as it was.

"Listen," he got out. "I'm with a bunch of station kids and a few from the _Lotus_ , middle of Green Dock, in the buffer zone between the deck and the outer edge of the ring. They're mostly okay, but we need extraction. Air's bad—" As if to illustrate, he broke off in a helpless, wracking cough. His mouth tasted like blood. 

"Say again? Graff— _Jurgen_ —Location, damn it, _Lieutenant_ —"

There was a humming in his ears, blotting out Di's voice. His cheek was resting against the cold decking. Nothing but that between him and space. It was cold down here.

"Green Dock," he whispered. "Maintenance space. Need extraction—careful, I don't know what the leak is, don't know if it's flammable—don't let it—"

"Jurgen!"

Dark. 

***

He woke flat on his back in the sickbay—depressing that he recognized it even through the floating feeling that told him he was drugged to the eyeballs. His entire body felt heavy, and his lungs were like two sacks of cement. He tried to stir and came up against something—restraints, or just his own inability to move? Tried to speak and nothing happened.

Panic came, unthinking and automatic. He jerked helplessly, and then a hand settled on his arm. A firm, commanding grip that he somehow recognized before he even saw Signy's face, bending over him.

"Don't move," she told him, and somewhere under the panic and the drugs, some part of him—something too deep and instinctive to argue with—responded to that. "I'm going to get Dr. Sena," she added, as he stilled himself.

He was still trying to recall exactly how he got here when Sena appeared in his peripheral vision. "Ah, you're back with us again, are you?" she said cheerfully. "You might even remember it this time." He was dimly aware of fingertips pressing firmly against his ribs in a way that was unpleasant but at least not actually painful. "So let's just go back through what I've already explained a few times. You won't be able to speak yet. Your lungs are filled with an oxygen-saturated liquid to promote healing." A blanket was pulled away; he felt the chill across his chest. "It''s alterday and you've been unconscious at this point for four days. Mostly sedated. I think I'll be able to clear your lungs soon. Are you experiencing any pain or discomfort? Please blink twice if so."

He wasn't quite sure how to respond to that, finally responded with a slow blink. He was almost pleasantly hazy.

"Mmm," she murmured, doing something on a reader out of his field of vision. "I'll be back soon. If you're still awake, we'll see if your lungs can stand up to normal functioning again."

He floated. Di was there, speaking to someone above him. He held onto Sena's explanation and the memory of Signy Mallory at his bedside, not sure why but determined not to let it slip away this time. He lost some time, he was fairly sure, but not those memories. And then there were strong hands on him, sitting him up, and Sena telling him to cough.

_This_ part, he wished afterward that he could forget. Getting the liquid out of his lungs was one of the most deeply unpleasant experiences of his life. When it was over, his chest felt damp and strange. He inhaled cautiously, coughing a little.

"Pain?" Sena asked briskly, probing his chest after she had set aside, with no sign of discomfort or disgust, the basin of pink-tinged liquid. He became aware that the hands holding him were Di's. He was naked except for a blanket across his lap.

"Not really," he said hoarsely. There was something almost unexpected about trying to talk and having actual words come out.

Sena injected something, patted his arm, and helped him lie down. He felt Di's hands ease away, and wanted to ask him not to leave. There were a lot of questions he had, now that he was starting to pull a few coherent thoughts together. Like what had happened to the kids, if they were all right, if all the Norways were okay, if they were still in dock at Mariner ...

That last one, he managed to get out. "Where," he whispered. "Where are we?"

"Mariner, still," Di said. He gave a sideways grin. "Captain seemed to think you didn't need to go through trank in your condition."

He tried to say something about that, but he was losing his grip on the world, spinning away. 

He woke abruptly to dimmed lights and Signy's rejuv-pale head bent over a reader beside his bed.

At some point while he was out, he had been put into a gown and covered with more comfortable blankets. He was still in sickbay, but not attached to wires beyond a single monitor clamped to his finger. The readouts from the medbed cast a faint glow over Signy's hair and shoulders and the wall. She was making notes, and for a little while he was taken with the slight scritch of her stylus on the reader, the careful sweep of her fingers as she navigated through whatever business she was doing, inexplicably, by his bedside.

At last the tickle in his throat grew to something approaching a cough. He cleared his throat, and Signy raised her head sharply.

"Do you need water?" she asked. "Sena said you could have it if you wanted it."

He cleared his throat again, and nodded. Signy raised the head of the bed slightly—she knew her way around a medbed; he'd never been in a position to notice that—and brought him a cup with a straw. He drank, feeling uncomfortable about it. This seemed like an undignified thing for his captain to do. She was so matter-of-fact about it that it wasn't like he could say no, though. Also, his hands felt like two lead weights at the ends of his arms. It wasn't that he couldn't move, exactly. It was just that he didn't particularly want to.

He slowly became aware of a little more of his environment. It was just the two of them in the sickbay, the other medbeds folded up against the wall. They were in gee. It felt like docking gee, rather than the thrust of acceleration; he didn't feel the engines' thrum through the bed.

But no, they weren't underway, they were at Mariner, as Di had said. And everything else Di had said, about staying in dock until he was ready for trank, wasn't something he wanted to bring up with Mallory, now or ever. 

"Was anyone else hurt?" he asked instead. His voice was a dry thread.

"Just you. Thanks largely _to_ you, in fact. By the time it happened, all of our people had either cleared out of the danger zone or were prepared to take cover. The rest of your ... Di is calling them _ducklings,_ a reference I expect you won't even recognize, but in any case, they've already made a full recovery—and yes, I did check with _Lotus_ on that. She's outbound now."

He felt the slightest of twinges at that. More than likely, _Norway's_ path wouldn't cross _Lotus Dancer's_ again until those kids were grown with kids of their own.

"What happened?" he asked, trying to arrange himself a little more comfortably on the bed. Despite the soft blankets, the medbed was hard underneath, stiff with its array of medical equipment. "To the station, that is."

"Rock," Signy said succinctly. "Boosted to sublight speeds—I suppose it could easily have holed something more vital, or so the number-crunchers tell me, but as it was, it ruptured some storage tanks under the docks. There was a rather tense situation for a few hours while blame was apportioned, which you had the advantage of missing."

"Lucky me." He could imagine it, though. _Had_ imagined it, while he was trapped belowdecks, everyone on all sides (station, Fleet, merchanter) rushing to point fingers, everyone seeing spies and saboteurs everywhere.

"Indeed," Signy said dryly. "You've found a unique way of avoiding local politics, I have to say."

"How long 'til I'm out of here?" Oblique way of asking how long they were stuck at Mariner, unless he wanted to argue his way into tranking for jump while feeling like this, and he didn't particularly have the energy. Mallory would have talked to Sena about it; he was confident of that.

"Sena says you'll be back to quarters in a couple of days, once she's sure your lungs won't land you right back in sickbay. Now," she said, "I have a cargo manifest to finalize and some papers to go through, if you don't mind."

She settled back in at his bedside, while Graff indignantly thought that she could get it done better and faster in her office, but sleep was dragging him down again. He turned his head to the side and watched her, the silver head bowed over the reader, face intent in concentration, and the scritch of her stylus followed him down into sleep.

He woke again to some sort of quiet argument.

"This is a warship, not a civilian hospital." Di, that.

"I've no issue with it." Sena.

"It's a security risk!"

"Mallory already approved it."

"Over my objections," Di said. 

Sena sounded faintly exasperated. "I'm fine with leaving the final decision up to him."

A slit-lidded appraisal of the medbay suggested that he was still its only occupant, which made Graff suspect he was the "he" in question. "Leave what up to me?" he asked.

Someone moved nearer to him. A hand fell on his shoulder, Di's strength in the grip's solidity. 

"There are stationers requesting access to _Norway,"_ Di said. "An obvious security risk given present circumstances."

Graff fished for names. "Is one of them called Adia?"

Di blew out a breath. "Friends of yours?" He sounded like a man who knew he'd already lost an argument.

"Sort of," Graff said.

He managed to be up, in a sense, by the time that the security snarl unsnarled itself—sitting up, hair combed, even a reader in his lap, which he thought Di had tossed in as a sort of protective camouflage to disguise the fact that he wasn't yet entirely capable of being awake for more than half an hour at a time.

It was Adia; also Chantou and a few others, a motley bunch of stationers looking shockingly out of place with their bright clothes and civilian hairstyles and jewelry in the sickbay's drab interior. They all brightened when they saw him, which made him think of how Signy had called them ducklings. Those were birds, he knew that much. Earth birds, at least in pictures, were a colorful bunch. He remembered it vividly, all of a sudden, pictures that he'd seen of pink bright birds with too-brilliant green behind them. 

The stationers looked extremely nervous and uncomfortable, exactly as if they were indeed a flock of Earth birds that had somehow ended up in the medbay of a warship, but they all brightened immediately when they saw him. He smiled at them awkwardly, not sure what they _did_ expect, exactly. 

Taking that as an invitation, they descended on his bed.

"Are you okay?" Chantou asked. She still had the glimmering jewelry, flashing tiny sparks under the medbay's lights. There was some part of him that kept wanting to tell her she was out of uniform.

The friend beside her, a stationer girl whose name Graff couldn't easily remember (Mandilu? something like that?) shoved an elbow in her ribs. "Of course he's not okay, he's the color of vat fungus," she hissed.

Adia hushed them. "We came to thank you," she said. "You saved us."

"On behalf of the _Norway_ ," Graff began, the start of a halting speech that he found himself composing on the fly, as he might have accepted and simultaneously deflected a stationer's thanks as the ship's XO.

"I don't mean the ship," Adia said, making a gesture with her fingers that he didn't quite recognize; it was something different from what he'd grown up with, part of the station's own subtle language. "We came here to see _you._ How are you?"

"Did they have to regrow your lungs?" one of the kids asked. "My uncle had his lungs regrown after a mining accident. It looked really hard."

"No," he said, trying not to smile. "They didn't regrow my lungs. They just filled them with fluids for a bit."

"That also sounds pretty bad," Chantou said, her mouth a perfect "O" of horror.

"It wasn't fun," he admitted.

"My uncle—" the other kid began.

"No one cares, Dean," Chantou said, stepping on his foot.

There was something incredibly charming about their banter, about their bright presence, that it took him a little while to fully understand—until he realized that it put him in mind of his childhood illnesses, the station-borne diseases brought back to the ship by visiting juniors and the time he'd had his appendix out, with a dozen _Polly d'Or_ cousins around his bed at all times. In this case, of course, they had the drab sickbay surroundings and Di peeking in from the corridor, being incredibly unsubtle about it. But that had its own charm, a dash of the present mixed in with the past.

Finally Adia took charge and began to corral them for herding out. "I'm sorry, we'll let you sleep."

"I'm not tired," he said, although he was. 

"Can we write you?" Mandilu asked—or, no, Merrilu, that was it.

"I suppose?" It was a question he'd never had to answer before. There were occasional data packets from the _Polly_ , relayed through a dozen ships by the time they got to him. He hadn't seen a single person from that ship since he'd left her. He didn't even know anymore how old they would be now—different ship times never quite synced up, depending upon layover and route—or how many more, or fewer, cousins he had now than he'd had then. "You'll have to send it by whatever merchanters are in the area, and I don't know how long it will take to get to me. Decades, maybe. You shouldn't expect an answer."

"We'll write anyway!" Chantou called, and then they were pushed out into the corridor. Adia hesitated, and then came back to give his hand a quick and unexpected squeeze with hers. Fleet, obviously, were not big on physical affection. Merchanters were, of course—family, all. And stationers, perhaps, in their own way. He remembered that stationers had seemed cold and distant to him as a child. Perhaps it was only by comparison to the _Polly_ ; perhaps it was because he hadn't known them, and had kept to himself as a junior of the Pollies on leave.

"Thanks," she whispered, and fled, leaving him alone, still feeling her hand on his—remembering a time when he was surrounded by the shrill voices of young cousins, reassured by the physical comfort of a family's small touches.

After a little while, Di came in.

"So did they plant any bombs?" Graff said, as Di settled on the stool by the bed. "Despoil the sacred halls of the _Norway?"_

Di snorted and planted his elbows solidly on his knees. "It's a security risk and you know it. You'd say the same if you were up on the bridge in your usual place and a request came in to have the ship swarmed with stationers."

"Stationers come on all the time," he said, unable to resist a little needling, the way he might have prodded a cousin back on the _Polly_. "Stationmasters, customs—"

"Not fourteen-year-olds, for mercy's sake."

Graff laughed and dropped his head back against the pillows, no longer having to keep up appearances. "What did Mallory's face look like when they sent the request?"

"I wasn't there, I couldn't say." Di blew out a breath. "You know, if you're taking visitors, there are a certain number of people on _Norway_ who have made requests. The rider crews, for example. Especially a certain one."

"Do I look ready to take them on, Di?"

Di laughed. He planted a hand, abruptly, on Graff's shoulder—warm, through the thin fabric of the gown—and pushed him back against the pillows. "How about you get some sleep."

He relaxed. Di's hand stayed there, warm and strong, like a physical metaphor for the anchoring presence of Fleet. Not cousin, Di, definitely not; but not stranger either, something new, something there was no word for in merchanter parlance. 

Always something new.

Anchored in station gravity, doubly anchored by Di's presence, he sank into deep, healing sleep without hesitation.


End file.
